Bodmin VE Day: Meet the Homefront Kitchen Girls

Tindle News

Bodmin VE Day: Meet the Homefront Kitchen Girls who tour Devon and Cornwall with their displays and demonstrations of how people ate in the time of rations of WWII

Transcript

00:00Hi, we are Laura and Pam and we're the Homefront Hotting Girls.

00:06Thank you. So firstly, tell us about this VE Victory Day cake.

00:10Tell us a bit about how it's made and how it's made in the war.

00:13Well, it's basically a boiled fruit cake.

00:17So your fruit, sugar and water are boiled together with a little bit of fat.

00:21This really is a tiny little bit of margarine goes in.

00:24And then you let that get cool.

00:27And in the meantime, you've sifted your national flour to get the grains out of it.

00:31But you couldn't get hold of white flour quite so easily.

00:35And then you mix that and you sift that with cinnamon, allspice and nutmeg.

00:42And some cocoa powder.

00:45Part of that is because you can't really get hold of the dark sugars that you would normally use for a rich cake.

00:51So it helps to colour it and it gives an added bit of sweetness to it.

00:56And then Laura has iced it.

00:59Now, although commercial bakers couldn't get hold of icing sugar, weren't actually committed to ice cakes.

01:06If you actually managed to get hold of some icing sugar, you could actually ice your cake.

01:11So we've managed to get hold of some icing sugar.

01:14And we have iced the cake with a little bit of royal icing.

01:17And in suitably patriotic colours.

01:22So it's a good example of what would have been cooked in celebration at the end of the war.

01:26Yes.

01:27And what would probably have happened, because of the amount of fruit and sugar and so on involved in it,

01:31is that several households would have clubbed together.

01:34Because all of these things were on points.

01:38The sugar was rationed, of course, and all the dried fruit was on points.

01:41So you would have to have several people's rations put together to create something like this.

01:47So tell us about some of the other items on the table.

01:49For example, this is the national loaf, I believe.

01:51That's the national loaf, yes.

01:53The recipe's down there.

01:55It was made with a high extraction flour.

02:00So 85% extraction flour, using as much of the wheat crop as possible.

02:07It wasn't very popular.

02:09It was considered to be Hitler's secret weapon, was the national loaf.

02:13Because it was highly salted.

02:16It was very dense.

02:18But it was a bit of a shock if you've been used to, as many people had, eating white bread, nice white bread.

02:26When you went to the bakers to buy it, if you didn't bake it yourself, you could only buy it one day old.

02:32Because it's easier to slice it economically, if it's a day old, than if it's freshly baked.

02:38And they weren't allowed to slice it for you either.

02:40Again, because you need to be very economical with it.

02:45So that's the national loaf.

02:47That would make your sandwiches.

02:49We have made some authentic sandwich fillings today.

02:51We have.

02:52Wait a minute, there's not very many left because we've been eating them all day.

02:55But they've actually turned out really, really nice.

02:58They have, yes.

02:59A lot of it was, they were designed really to help to save your butter ration, or your margarine ration.

03:05So that you make the milk as soft as possible.

03:08So that you don't need to butter the bread.

03:11The only time that you would need to, there's one recipe, we haven't tried it out yet actually.

03:15And that's the shredded cabbage that you mix with salad dressing.

03:18And that would be a bit wet.

03:19So you'd probably want to use your butter on both slices of bread.

03:23But other than that, we have, it spreads your cheese ration.

03:27Because there's only three ounces of cheese in there.

03:30But it's mixed with two tables, three tablespoons of pickle lily and three of chutney.

03:35And then we also did a corned beef one.

03:39And that's, that was a tiny amount of corned beef, wasn't it?

03:43It was two ounces of corned beef mixed with a dessert spoon of pickle.

03:48And then just softened up a little bit with some Worcester sauce.

03:52And then put into the sandwiches.

03:53And they've been very nice.

03:54They have been really enjoying it.

03:56We also made, you'll have to forgive the non-1940s container, but we've also made a curried egg.

04:03Now that is made with dried egg, which is this here.

04:08And first of all, you take spring onions, chop them up really finely and in a tiny bit of fat you fry them off.

04:15And then you add a tablespoon of curry powder, some salt and pepper.

04:20And you make up your dried egg, which is, you would use three tables, three leveled tablespoons of dried egg to six tablespoons of water.

04:28Mix it up so that it's nice and smooth.

04:30And then it goes into the frying pan and basically scrambles.

04:33So you've got a sort of a scrambled, scrambled egg filling.

04:37That needed a little bit more moisture with it.

04:40But it's, it's quite a, quite a nice, we've actually quite enjoyed that.

04:43It's been really pleasant. You wouldn't know it was dried egg.

04:45I think dried egg has a really bad reputation.

04:48Oh yes, it has.

04:49But it's actually, when it's prepared properly, it's quite palatable.

04:52And that's the trick actually.

04:53You really did need to adhere to the one level tablespoon of dried egg, to the two tablespoons of water.

04:59Otherwise it really wasn't, it didn't work very well.

05:02And yet again, another non-1940s container I'm afraid, but this is mock banana.

05:07And for that you take a parsnip, a nice medium sized parsnip, and you peel it, chop it up, and add some sugar.

05:19Once you've drained it, you mash it, add sugar and a little banana essence that you have squirreled away before the war.

05:25And that's actually quite convincing, isn't it?

05:29Yes.

05:30It's not as, if you hadn't had a banana for a very long time, it would be as close as you were going to get until after the war.

05:38But that's another one.

05:39So these are the sorts of things that you could have found at a VE Day party for the celebrations, and that's what we've tried to create here today.

05:49So tell us a bit about yourselves as well, and the story behind the Homefront Kitchen Girls.

05:54Well, Pam and I met quite a while ago at Lennon Hydrock.

05:58Yes.

05:59Where we both, Pam's still volunteers there.

06:01And we both worked on creating the costume volunteer programme for the kitchens.

06:07So the Victorian Costumes Researching Food.

06:10So we were well versed in this kind of thing.

06:12And then we thought that it might be fun to take part in RAF Harraby, which happens up at Yelverton every year.

06:19And that was about three years ago.

06:20So we put together some costumes and a collection of items, some of which are reproductions, some of which are authentic,

06:29which has grown quite substantially in the last three years.

06:32And yeah, we have a really lovely time.

06:35We've travelled around, we tend to do events in Cornwall and Devon predominantly.

06:40But we love it.

06:41We love doing the research and we love trying new recipes.

06:44And just chatting about the Homefront because it would have been a universal experience for most people during the Second World War.

06:51Well, the other thing is that we've met some really interesting people whilst we've been doing it.

06:55Some people have been generous enough to actually donate us items as well.

06:59And it's just, it's left I think both of us with an enormous amount of respect, particularly for those on the Homefront.

07:08The Housewives.

07:09For the Housewives.

07:10And what they had to deal with and get their heads around, you know, the rationing and then the points system.

07:18All whilst sometimes, some of them holding down jobs with their men away.

07:24And then air raids.

07:28And a lot of places, they had to cope with the air raids as well.

07:32So you can just imagine, you're in the middle of preparing dinner and the siren goes.

07:36So you've got to rush off down to the shelter.

07:38And then you've got to remember to turn the gas off first before you go.

07:42So it's just left us with an enormous amount of respect for everybody that went through from 1939 to 1945.

07:51Seems amazing.

07:52We've got to go along.

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